Fuck a Card Sleeve

Legomancer wrote: This is a true story and the game was Battle for Souls.

Amen. If I play a game often enough that it needs card sleeves, it will have earned that 50-100 dollars to reacquire it.

In this way I'm a lot like Barnes, I do not care about the physical integrity of my games.

I've sleeved:
-Lost Cities because my cards were starting to stick when shuffling and with it going OOP a pack of sleeves was less than a new copy of the game.
-PoD expansion for Descent because the PoD cards suck and they are small decks of cards that get shuffled fairly often, and sleeves make small decks of crap cards easier to shuffle.
-Merchants and Marauders to aid in the shuffling of the smaller decks...Haven't played since I sleeved.
-Siege of the Citadel and BattleMasters because I'd like to keep those from getting any worse than they are.

And I think that is it...
For me, I think it is more of a shuffling aid.

It's probably easier for me to list the games I _haven't_ sleeved. I don't sleeve any game where the cards are not being handled or shuffled a lot, like King of Tokyo. The better the cardstock, the less likely the game will be sleeved. Pandemic has great card quality, as do many FFG games that have that linen-texture finish. Also, white border cards are harder to mark than black or color bordered ones. I am less like to sleeve a solitaire game, as I'll probably be the only one playing it, and I trust myself obviously.

I don't sleeve inexpensive games, like Onirim or Urbion. I did sleeve Love Letter though, as a big part of that game is guessing what everyone else is holding, plus it's only like 16 cards. If a game has odd-sized cards, like Friday, I'm not going nuts hunting down sleeves for that exact size. I know Swan PanAsia probably makes them, but good luck buying them without spending waaay too much.

I think I am a reasonable sleever. I like to keep my games nice, but I don't think I am super neurotic about it.

I use Fantasy Flight Games brand card sleeves as they're good quality and they're cheap, about $2-$2.50 for a pack of 50, and come in the most common card sizes. I used to use Dragon Shield. Fuck, they're expensive. Anybody want to buy some? I have a ton in pink, also red, blue, and gold.

I'm *brutal* on cards. It's just a fact of life. Since I tend to be the guy who provides the games other people play, I don't give a shit about being brutal on said cards.

But I also hate playing with marked cards and do give enough of a shit to not have to replace them because *every* game is a $100 game these days. So I sleeve anything I have to shuffle more than once....

And I love the little sleeves for Wings of War plane cards as it makes 'em way easier to move across the table...

I'll 'fess up to getting almost(?) pathological with sleeving and to using sleeving (or stickering, or simply buying) as a substitute for playing when I have, as I do, more money than time. I'm not proud of it. I do think there are, as outlined above, some good sleeving cases, but I've gone well beyond that, I'm afraid.

I sleeve lots of stuff.

Still trying to figure out how to sleeve my dice. I could get a bunch of those old Trouble game dice popper dome things, but people would touch those too. So I figure I'll get a Kinect and mount it in the game room with software to monitor for when someone waves their hand in the air. The software can use the entropy from the hand waving to generate a random number between 1-100, and the player can use basic functions like division, rounding/ceiling/floor to convert it to the correct scale (D6, D8, D12, etc). There will be a separate computation table with pens & paper so that the game components don't get ink smudges.

If touching the dice is absolutely required, like in Kingsburg, then we will play it on a tablet or not at all. The tablet will have a large case and screen protector, and it will not be lifted off the table at any point, for fear of dropping. We will also use disposable styluses because everybody's hands except mine are nasty.

I have sleeved cards for two CCGs that I played competitively, Legend of the Five Rings and Jyhad. In both cases, there were significant changes to the card backs, so I sleeved specific card decks to avoid giving opponents clues about my cards in hand.

Sleeves were great for creating prototype cards when I was doing game design.

I have also sleeved cards for a few games that have cheap card stock or got heavy play.

Other than that, I avoid using sleeves, because I hate shuffling sleeved cards.

I actually have sleeves for War of the Ring, since they came with the first edition conversion kit. I should slap those on, cuz WotR is a forever game with a bullet.

I'm willing to sleeve for games like Citadels or Love Letter where there aren't many cards, and they get passed around a bunch. Ironically, I'm less likely to sleeve those, because it feels silly to buy a pack of 50 sleeves for 15 cards. I don't have that many games like that that need sleeving.

A well-loved game has earned its battle scars. I've still got the Great Dalmuti deck that we played the hell out of since college. It's grimy as hell, and I love it.

Back in the early days of Magic there was this con we would always go to. There was this one guy we would play against who had a "juggernaut" deck. So this dude would walk around the con all day, sweating and clutching this thing everywhere he went. The best way to describe this deck is to take a block of cheddar cheese and cut it into the shape of a Magic deck. Now, grip it real tight around 3 sides and then walk around for an hour while getting all sweaty. It was so deformed like that and brown and nasty. He just didn't give a fuck. But we thought it was hilarious because it was so gross and those cards had value (to us newbs). I can't remember how he shuffled the damn thing.

ThirstyMan wrote: "Three of the guys were eating Cheetos"